The next arc of X-Men kicks off with the X-Men deciding to branch out and become more public in their roles as superheroes. To help facilitate this, as Angel, Iceman and Pixie are busy cleaning up San Francisco, Cyclops leads a team back to New York to hunt for a monster in the sewers – a monster that has previously run afoul of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Victor Gishler is giving me really the only thing I want in an X-Men comic. While most of the other books are spending their time in incestuous crossovers and plotlines that get so complicated that you pretty much need a PhD in X-Menology to understand what’s going on, this title is giving us a very straightforward superhero story with an unorthodox group of heroes, and he’s using the entire Marvel universe as his playground. Guest stars like Spider-Man in this arc, and Blade and Namor in the previous one, help us feel like the book is part of a greater community, while the avoidance of mutant enemies does the same thing. That’s not to say that this book will never touch on the greater X-Men universe, but as long as it remains largely self-contained, it’s giving me what I want.

It also helps that Gishler is a witty writer, one that can keep the book lighthearted while still exciting, and best of all, he writes Cyclops as a leader instead of a chump, something that even Wolverine has to accept in this issue. Hell, Gishler can even use Gambit in the story without making me hate him. Do you have any idea how rare that is?

The cover, by the Dodsons, is a great, clean rendition of our heroes, and Chris Bachalo’s interiors are a lot better than he did back in the 90s. It’s funny – he was the hot new thing back then, but I find I like his artwork a lot more now.